


Modern Prometheus

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:29:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' They should call it Rachel's law.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modern Prometheus

Her life had always been a field of golden opportunities, a crop of ‘yes’ sprouting wherever the eye fell. It was pom-poms and electron microscopes, being the prom queen and Fulbright scholar - the girl next door and the bad girl going everywhere.

Limitations were for people who weren’t beautiful, popular and a genius. People who weren’t Rachel Porter, in other words.

* * *

 

Until Miles.

She loved him, but she couldn’t change him. No matter how hard she tried. He drank too much, he ate like he’d never heard of health and he kept on being a Marine. He ignored her health drinks and drank whisky, she made him salad and he ordered in pizza and he laughed and shrugged off the job offers she got him.

Sometimes she thought he just didn’t want to change.

She hated him, but she couldn’t leave him. No matter how hard she tried. All he had to do was smile at her and pull her into a kiss, whiskey sharp on his breath and hands completely unimpressed by her arguments, and all the reasons ‘no’ drifted away. Until the sweat and come had dried and his best friend came knocking at midnight to crash on their couch, stinking out the flat with the smell of stale smoke and cheap beer and cheaper sex - looking at her in the mornings like she was the interloper. Until he went away on a tour of duty and she spent months flinching at every phone call, afraid he was dead or broken or just lost.

So she fucked his brother.

She couldn’t leave him, but she could make him leave her.

* * *

 

Until Charlie.

She wasn’t Miles’. It would have been easier if she was, if that was the lie that Rachel told. Instead, she was the ghost of door’s not opened, shades of what-could-have-been in the Matheson cant of her jaw and the stubborn willfulness of her moods.

That she was the glue of the family reconciliation between the Matheson brothers didn’t endear her any to Rachel. Charlie’s cooing adoration of her Uncle Miles was like an accusation. Baby for ‘if he’d been my Daddy I would sleep through the night and not vomit or cry or spite-pee the minute you take my nappy off’.

It was stupid. Rachel knew that. She had read a dozen books on child development for every month of her pregnancy. If Miles was around 24/7 instead of twice a year, if Charlie wasn’t prepped with a good night and novelty to be on her best behaviour, he’d get peed on and have turnip mash smacked into his face too. To Charlie, the most important thing about Miles was that he came equipped with toys in his pockets.

Intellectually Rachel knew that, and that was the only sort of knowledge she’d ever cared about.

So why did her jaw still clench when Miles dangled Charlie upside down and made her giggle? Why did she resent her daughter’s gappy, huge smile?

So she got pregnant again. A baby that didn’t have any ‘maybe’ attached, no lingering echoes of Miles’ or guilt from how that ended. They’d be a family and Miles’ would be a satellite, phased out year by year.

* * *

 

Until Danny.

It was as if by excising Miles from their lives she had cut some essential Matheson sturdiness from her baby. Charlie had all the usual baby illness milestones, but she toddled undaunted through the sniffles and fevers. Grubbiness was her natural state and she thrived like a weed on what little attention they could give her.

Rachel was guiltily aware that she was an easy child to neglect. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her, but Charlie was born to be independent. And they’d have all of Charlie’s life to make the diet of baby-minders, cartoons on a loop and spaghetti in a tin up to her. This might be all the life Danny got, and Rachel didn’t want to look at her daughter one day and resent an afternoon in the park that turned out to be 1/16 of Danny’s life.

She wasn’t good at being a mother. That had become painfully clear to her over the years of endless ‘whys’ and tedious children’s parties and paintings that didn’t look anything like a house no matter WHAT she said. She was good at fighting, though. All those years of ‘yes’ had made her the perfect person to refuse to accept ‘no’.

So, she fought for Danny. When he broke, she found a way to fix him. When that didn’t work, she tried again. Her life had been full of so many possibilities, like Plath’s figs bursting between her teeth, and Danny had so few.

* * *

 

Until the Nanites.

Of everything she’d aspired to, every part of her life she’d tried to fix, they were perfect. Rachel sat on the floor of the cabin - they’d scrubbed the blood from the floor, dragged the bodies to the cellar - and flicked through her notes.

Everything she’d tried to do for the last ten years had been fatally fucking flawed, but these… She stroked her fingers over the page, trying to soak up the confidence, the arrogance, a sure hand had imbued in the straight lines and inked diagrams. Self-repairing, self-replicating, selfless - in 1000 years not only would her nanites still be functioning, the first miniscule monster would still be alive.

Not alive. That was anthromorphic and hypocritical. One thing the nanites were not, was self-willed. They didn’t design themselves, they didn’t turn themselves on. That was down to her.

Oh the others contributed, but their consciences were their own affair. She knew what weighed on hers.

Like Frankenstein, she had created a monster. Only this monster spared the one’s closest to her, the one’s she loved. It held the balance of their lives in its hands, hostage to her good behaviour, as it consumed the world.

‘The bitter sting of remorse shall not cease to rankle,’ she whispered, closing the book.


End file.
